J.G wrote:
"We have a project team with a very large User Guide with many images and
they've had to recreate the tag tree/manually retag in Adobe Acrobat Pro but
they are looking for a simpler (read as less time intensive) solution."

Upgrade to Word 2013.
When exported to PDF from Word 2013, figure tags are in the correct location
in the tag tree.
Simple, easy as pie.

Excerpt:
There is a known issue that affects Microsoft Office Word 2007 and Microsoft
Word 2010. The issue is associated with the tags that are created in PDF
files that are generated from Word documents. When you export a document
that contains images to PDF, the tags for those images may have to be
updated by using a PDF authoring tool.

When you export a document that contains images to PDF, the tags for those
images may appear at the top of the PDF tag tree instead of in the correct
location in the document flow. The tags for those images may have to be
updated by using a PDF authoring tool.

We have a project team with a very large User Guide with many images and
they've had to recreate the tag tree/manually retag in Adobe Acrobat Pro but
they are looking for a simpler (read as less time intensive) solution.